Hey, remember that there are plenty of people that rely on credit cards to provide some extra income. Credit card fraud is pretty much a non-prosecuted crime in the US. Why not let the folks that can make what money they can?
Evidently, the person with the prototype is in Russia. I guess Nokia probably could pay for whatever police enforcement they would like to have on this, so that may be what is going to happen.
I would suspect the proper answer would be the same as if it was dropped into an active volcano - something along the lines of "Well, there it goes."
This sounds like a Wikipedia approach to "truth"... you have enough people voting on it and sooner or later you have something that sort of resembles and might actually be truth. Or in this case, accuracy.
I would think there would be much better ways than this of obtaining accuracy. One of the basic problems with any voting scheme is that you can get a large amount of drift as it is assumed there is no standard other than concensus. NTP is a reference because there is are systems out there that are known to be anchored to accurate time standards.
I suppose if you were setting up a platform on Mars and had nothing else except concensus and voting this might be an approach. But that would seem to be about the only reason for accepting a scheme like this. On Earth there are way, way better ways of dealing with the problem that are actually rooted to accurate standards.
Everyone should know about paper recycling - it costs more to use recycled paper than new. The quality is questionable as well. The result is that most paper is dumped into an incinerator or a landfill by recycling centers because it is pointless to attempt to recycle post-consumer paper.
Plastic bottles can be recycled... except if one tiny little bottle cap or ring gets into the mix the entire batch is worthless. Since this happens most of the time again plastic bottles are not generally recycled.
Aluminium is one great success in that it is actually cheaper to smelt down aluminium cans than it is to process the raw ore. So a lot of aluminium is actually recycled and it makes economic sense.
Really, if we wanted to build the cost of recycling computers and other high-tech devices into the product cost you would quickly see a drop in new product consumption. $500 for the computer with a $500 add-on for recycling it. $600 for an iPad with $500 for recycling it. $25,000 for a car with $10,000 for recycling it. It would be one way to deal with the recycling problem and it would immediately end most of the need to actually recycle things because the sales would be so reduced as to not require much recycling at all. It would be a way of actually implementing "reduce".
Without that, there is going to be little incentive to either meaningfully reduce consumer buying or force consumers to recycle obsolete or non-functional items. I'd say a minimum charge of $500 for any high-tech device would be reasonable, assuming the devices are being disassembled and processed using Western wage level workers. Now the $10 for the plastic water bottle (each) might also have an effect on both sales of such single-use bottles and the number entering landfills.
My guess on the Apple connectors is that they can be licensed out for a fee. Considering the margins on notebook computers these days, nobody is going to reward Apple for their engineering talent on that connector by licensing it from Apple.
Of course we all know that Apple should just give it away so everyone can benefit. After all, wouldn't that be the nice thing to do?
Wouldn't surprise me if Dell patented their connector and power-supply sensing as well.
The problem is the ratings. If you have a notebook that requires 110 watts to power the seven USB connectors, GPU, three fans and the 17 inch display and you plug in a common 65 watt power supply you are going to have (a) a fire or (b) a blown fuse and a non-functioning power supply.
So manufacturers have strong motivations to make sure that you can only connect the proper power supply to the computer. If it was possible to connect the wrong one, people would do it. If there was a fire the manufacturer (not the idiot that did it) would be blamed. In the US, the manufacturer would also be sued and likely lose. Allowing idiots to start fires is not viewed very well by juries. We must protect our idiots as they may be important political or business leaders someday.
So it is obvious - require all notebooks to use the same rating power supply. That isn't going to go over very well with Alienware or a number of other desktop-replacement companies that have notebooks with enourmous power requirements. It would also be silly for netbooks to have to use the same larger power supply.
Now a standard connector based on ratings might work. But there are still going to be 10 different connectors because not everyone is going to go to the trouble that Dell did.
I find this somewhat hard to believe. For the last 8 years or more Dell has standardized on two power supplies with a single connector. The 65 watt and 90 watt supplies - together with software to make sure that if you connect the 65 watt power supply to a computer that needs the 90 watt one it will degrade gracefully.
So basically, anyone with a Dell notebook needs only a single type of power supply. You found it difficult to find a replacement in Japan? These are sold on Ebay from China they are so common. I have left mine in various places but never have I run into a situation where someone didn't have one lying around - usually from an older Dell notebook that wasn't being used.
Dell is halfway there already to having a standardized power supply and has gone the extra mile to make sure that plugging the wrong capacity one in doesn't result in a fire or a blown fuse.
Kensington also sells a "generic" power supply often available for as little as $20 with a Dell connector in the box. If all you need is the 65 watt version, this is probably the most common power supply on the planet right now.
The changes aren't just not driving an SUV. It is things like not driving at all. Not being able to buy food in plastic packaging and only buy food that is grown within 100 miles or so of where you live. Things like starting to put people to work demolishing freeways in California so the space can be used to move people closer to where they work - no more driving, no more freeways, etc.
Do you begin to understand the magnitude of the changes that are actually required?
How about a simple one? Assuming the immigration influx into the US continues and the building of new powerplants continues on the rapid pace it has for the last 40 years (like none at all), you can expect that we will be running out of electricity commonly. We have to make some hard decisions about offices and homes - and telecommunity isn't a solution. If your refrigerator won't keep food cold for a day without electricity better think about getting a new one. If your pets can't live without air conditioning, time to start thinking about an aquarium instead.
Sure, we could supply the entire country's electrical needs from solar cells in Arizona and Nevada. Except, who is going to keep the protesters out of the meetings where the new transmission lines get decided on? Nobody? It is their right? Well, then you can forget about new transmission lines because way, way too many people "know" they cause cancer, impotence and all sorts of other bad things. So they will not be built and solar cell farms in Arizona and Nevada will never be built, just like the huge wind farms in Texas - because the electricity cannot be transferred from there to the cities where it is needed.
For a moment, let us accept that the only way to actually force change upon the climate-change deniers is to take radical, violent action. Without this, they will not believe, they will not change and everything on the planet will die.
So, what have you done to further the goal of knocking these deniers off their pedastle of wealth and convenience? Burned any cars? After all, they are a symbol of 20th Century Western progress, right? How about destroying an airliner on the ground? They spew millions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year and you're not likely to hear of anyone dying because they couldn't go on vacation, right?
Maybe destroying a powerplant would be a good step? Or maybe a automobile bridge? Any of these is likely to have a positive effect on the balance of CO2 in the atmosphere.
Sadly, I have to report that the totals for 2010 so far are: 0 automobiles destroyed in the name of climate change, 0 airliners destroyed and 0 bridges destroyed. Due to massive opposition, no hydroelectric dams have been built. No nuclear plants are under construction and those that are planned have years and years of environmental impact studies to go before the first hole is dug.
Overall, I'd say the climate-change deniers are winning the game. If everyone is so convinced that these deniers are not rational, why is nothing happening?
The problem is, you can't conserve your way out of the current set of problems. Just plugging the thing in consumes power. Power that, if it wasn't generated in the first place, wouldn't need any help in reducing some carbon footprint.
Come on, folks. There are two possible alternatives here. Plugging in yet another computer pushes things closer and closer to a tipping point where all life on the planet may suddenly die or there is no such thing as "anthropomorphic climate change", in which case it makes no difference. You can't have it both ways, which means any "conservation" effort which doesn't have a net negative consumption of resources is simply misdirection.
So if you want to talk about carbon footprints, it is really quite simple - don't plug it in. Unplug something else. This is a net benefit. Everything else, and I do mean everything else, is just moving things closer and closer to the point where the problems will be obvious.
So far, I have yet to see someone actually unplug something. They will make all kinds of excuses about how they are really "conserving" something or another by making their own lives easier. They are taking advantage of the electric power that through its generation may be destroying the biosphere. They are flying in planes that may be destroying the biosphere. They are driving cars that may be destroying the biosphere. I don't care if they traded in a Hummer for a Prius - it is simply a matter of degree. So they are contributing to the end of all life on the planet a little more slowly than they were before.
Of course, the other alternative is that "climate change" is something that is happening fully apart from the actions of humans and it makes no difference between driving a Hummer or a Prius, or not driving at all - as far as climate change is concerned. But to a lot of people it is deeply offensive to think that there are things that are utterly and completely beyond their (or anyone else's) control. I like to call this the "Not a sparrow shall fall" philosophy.
So if you are deeply committed to anthropomorphic climate change, go out a blow something up today or tomorrow. You will be doing your part to ensure that life does not end on Planet Earth. One (empty) jetliner is probably worth 1000 cars, at least.
Lawsuit. Everything in the US is driven by lawsuits.
Real simple. You call up the conference chairperson (or the venue where the conference is being held) and say "Our lawyer wants to thenk you for accepting liability for our ATM losses for the next six months. Of course, if you don't go ahead with the ATM security presentation we wouldn't have a case."
What do you do? I guess if you have the legal fund to stack up against the in-house counsel of a couple of banks it doesn't matter, let them threaten away. But really, who wants to take that risk?
The problem seems to be that you (as the taxpayer) get to support these folks one way or another.
Fine with plural marriage... not so fine with the seemingly usual result (broken homes, screwed up abused children). So the taxpayers get to support the excess wives and children.
If we could all just agree to have everyone supported by the government it would be much simpler. Then nobody would be complaining about having to support these people because we would all be supported by the government. No job, no problem - just get the same government money. I guess anyone left working (suckers!) would be paying 100% of their income in taxes. This would (obviously) do away with rich people as well as poor people - everyone would just get the same from the government.
Standard photoflash lamps emit actinic light with plenty of UV. This has a negative effect on just about everything.
I believe there has been multiple cases where this was observed over time - flash photography causing material changes in some sort of artifact. Based on this experience lots of museums allow photography, just no flash. Some places keep the light levels higher than they would otherwise (intentionally) so it is possible to take pictures without a flash.
There is another factor here that you are missing - lawsuits.
Let's say you and a buddy are going to stage an accident and your buddy (the "victim") want you to get some good photos of his "accident". So now you have a slip-and-fall with lots of people rushing over to help and some really nice photos to go with it. JACKPPOT!
Can you imagine why people might be a little sensitive about someone standing around taking pictures? Could it be documentation for a lawsuit?
Probably 80-90% of public-facing behavior in the US today is driven by the possibilty of a lawsuit. Anyone, anywhere can sue anyone at any time for anything. It costs less than $1000 to try and if you have a clever scheme you are going to be awarded as much as $50,000 to go away and not bother the big company or public agency. The lawyer helping is going to get 1/3rd of this, so there are many helpful lawyers around.
Right now today most people don't seem to understand the way this lottery works. So as you walk down the street maybe only 1% of the people you meet are thinking of ways to game the system and get paid off. Actually, it is probably more like 0.01% or 1 out of 10,000. When unemployment was 4% (officially and maybe 8-10% really) most people had real work to do that they were getting paid for. Today with official unemployment at 10% and the unofficial numbers more like 20-25% I would think there would be a lot more motivation to get even modest payoffs.
Really, if you could collect $50,000 once a year legally would you continue to work? If you didn't have a job wouldn't this be really appealing? I suspect we are going to see a lot more of this going on.
Well, for starter is might be because the schools (K-12) are actively teaching the benefits of piracy. You know, the teacher tells the students that this new piece of software for everyone to use actually costs $500 but she got it for free from www.thepiratebay.com and there is lots of other stuff out there - they should check it out. Next day one of the students is telling the others what great stuff he found out there and spreads it around.
Think it doesn't happen? Wrong.
Your credit card fraud item is a joke, right? You haven't been paying attention. There are criminal gangs operating all over the world that do this sort of thing, generally from relatively law-free places or places where the cops respond very well to bribes. How you going to stop it?
For both piracy and credit card fraud, it doesn't cost anyone anything and nobody can do anything about it. Live with it. If you are upset about credit card fraud, consider it just another aspect of a generally law-free Internet. It is going to happen. It happens to me once a year on average and it has yet to cost me anything.
Based on some anecdotal evidence, I'd say the answers to your questions are:
Students dropping out because of legal fees/fines: Less than 50. Probably less than 10. Ever.
Students pirating software, music and/or movies: 100%, or millions.
Students "busted" for piracy: Less than 0.001%
Students deterred from piracy because friends/acquantances being busted: 0.
Right now, no power on earth is going to change this. If the answer to #1 was 25% you might see a change, but that isn't possible. If the answer to #3 was 25% it might change things as well, but that isn't possible today either.
It is like catching 100% of speeders or 100% of drug users. Until you are actually injured in an accident by a person who is high or drunk it really doesn't sound like a problem needing a solution. We're training children in school about piracy - a how-to course - pretty much from first grade on up. The students see the teacher downloading and copying software and then their friends telling them what great stuff they got for free. It spreads. By the time they get to college it is an ingrained belief that if it is available on the Internet it is there for the taking. So we have copy-and-paste blogs, vast misuse of graphic images and people that believe they are doing the world a service when the rip a DVD and "share" it with the planet.
Sorry, but we have made a decision and it isn't going to be a bright sunny future for folks expecting revenue from digital goods. Now all we need is a way to download food and pirate rent money.
You are making a serious mistake. It is a common mistake, one made by our current President as well.
The mistake is beliving that all people in the US (or anywhere) can work at high skil jobs. There are probably three sorts of people that you need to consider:
People that innately, without a lot of training, can work at a high-skill job or a job that requires considerable talent. For example, a concert violist or someone that graduated high school at 15 and is working on high energy partical physics.
People that with training, perhaps considerable training, can work in a high-skill job. An example of this would be computer programming or tool and die work. Heliarc welding is probably another example.
People that for one reason or another aren't really trainable for high-skill jobs of any sort.
What a lot of people seem to think is that the world is composed of the first two categories of people and utterly ignore the third. The problem with this thinking is that there are a lot of people that fit into the third category and no amount of training, education or motivational counseling is going to get them to learn how to do something like working in a tool and die shop. They might be perfectly happy in being a baggage handler in an airport or pushing a mail cart. Nothing too complicated and nothing that requires "brain work". If you haven't met someone like this you might not understand but there is clearly some fraction of the population that just isn't interested in "brain work" and finds abstract symbol manipulation to be nearly imcomprehensible. Frustraing. Boring.
So what do we do with people that could get along in a 1930s factory but find the office in 2010 to be completely out of their league? Do we put them on permanent welfare because they can't fit in to any high-skill job? Are they deserving of only being homeless and living in a shelter because they can't cope with 21st Century life?
Better think about that, because in spite of what people would like to believe, there are a lot of these people out there. And most of them are going to be unemployed, permanently, the way things are going.
No, you wouldn't. You check Google and pricewatch to see the lowest price and buy based on that. That is what the Internet has brought us.
If the lowest price is from a company that models their workforce on a Roman slave galley and the next more expensive product treats their workers nicely, you are going to buy from the low-price leader. Because the price investigative services on the Internet don't tell you how the workers are treated or where the tech support is based out of.
Yes, after you buy the lowest-cost product and find the tech support to be useless you say "I'll never buy another Acme product again!" Absolutely. And then six months later you are looking for something different and it turns out the lowest-cost product is once again from Acme. You might wonder for a few minutes about it and think there should be something you remember about that company. But until the box arrives it doesn't really matter - you buy it anyway because they have the lowest price.
This is what the Internet has given us. The lowest price is pretty much going to trump everything because unless the company is run by Satan with whip-wielding overseers ensuring that worker productivity remains high those sorts of problems aren't really going to figure promently in Google and never in the Shopping section. When do you think Google will highlight an entry on the Shopping search with a red (blinking?) box that says "This company is evil!!!"? Yeah, right. Never. Certainly not with three exclamation points. Probably not even with one. Naa, forget about it - Google will never post such a warning.
So we are left with making purchasing decisions based on low price and only low price. Quality of tech support will never factor into the decision.
Why would anyone pay this tax? I am assuming that you wouldn't propose taxing foreign goods from foreign companies because they aren't using US workers, right?
So the immediate result would be that instead of say, Acme Bowling Balls using offshore IT workers would be to sell off the entire IT division of the company to an Indian subsidary. Who would then be using local labor. Net effect would be zero.
Similarly, if you make things unpleasant enough in the US any company of any real size would simply move their operations to a subsidary that was based in a more corporate-friendly (and profit-friendly) place. The result is the outsourced/offshored workers stay right where they are and even fewer US workers have jobs.
You see, what has happened in the last 20 years or so is the reduction in costs of moving virtually everything around the planet. So it is now cheaper to make something in Malayasia and ship it to LA than it is to make it in LA to begin with. When you are shipping stuff by the containerload the cost per item is very low. So there is virtually no reason for any company to maintain anything in the US any longer.
This has to be factored into any decision about this sort of thing. The limitations on moving the company are far, far fewer than they were in 1980 or so. But if the US shifts policies in ways that make it cheaper and more profitable to shift the place where the work is done, well, you can expect the company to be leaving the US shortly. Manufacturing has already gone that way - and there are very few companies where the operation simply cannot be moved out of the US.
Health care would seem to be impossible to move - except today for non-trauma related care you can ship the patients around quite a bit. Mexico is getting a lot of business from the Southwestern US because it is cheaper to have elective/corrective surgery there than it is in the US.
Obviously service related businesses like air conditioning repair can't really be moved. Except the corporate office can be moved and the service technicians simply report to a shell company operated from a foreign headquarters where all their IT and administrative work is carried out with cheaper labor.
So don't think that some business can't move out of the US. Chances are they can move if pushed hard enough. And should the US decide to tax businesses using foreign workers (which might be a WTO violation anyway), a lot more companies might just decide to up and move.
And how would you enforce this? Part of the attraction is in plenty of places there is virtually zero government (and legal) oversight. You get to do pretty much whatever you want without a lot of busybody government agents sticking their noses into your business.
Works really well in Africa, India and China. Not so well in the US, even on Montana and Idaho.
This means that whatever you pay your workers is your business. The government man comes by once in a while for their cut and some of that gets into the government tax fund. The bigger the amount that ends up in the government man's pocket the more you know you are going to be left alone, esp. in Africa. I suspect the rules are about the same in India and China.
Because I know of no other tax in the US that is based on "negative externalities". Gas taxes in Europe are certainly environmental, but in the US they are directed primarily at the Federal level towards highway maintenance.
Historically, the US tax code is behaviorally driven. You want home ownership? Give a tax break to home owners. You want companies to hire foreign workers on H1-B visas? Give a tax break for H1-B workers. There have been a few attempts at taxing undesired behavior, such as the short-lived luxury tax on large boats, but it pretty much crippled businesses in the Southeast related to boat-building and was repealed. Similarly, the gas-guzzler tax was designed to push people toward smaller, lighter more fuel-efficient cars with seriously bad crash performance - it was repealed after noticing it wasn't having the desired effect. Today, I do not believe there are any taxes designed to penalize behavior nor are there any taxes addressing "negative externalities".
Sure, you might like to have some, but I don't think you are going to get any.
What's wrong with the argument "it would be better for the country if we taxed X"?
Well, for starters, who exactly might be deciding what is best for the country? Pick any two polar opposite political figures - say Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich. Would you be happy with either one of them deciding which was "best for the country"? I'd bet that while you might be OK with one of them the other would be a problem. So for the most part we don't have people deciding what might be "best for the country" at any level.
Certainly an example of this is the current healthcare situation. Yes, someone thought it might be best for the country to have a government-run healthcare system but was completely unable to implement it. What we got was a half-measure that could be implemented that is going to be extremely costly to fix. A big clue is that many medium-sized companies are discovering it is cheaper to pay the "fine" than to provide what will be approved as a healthcare package for an employee. Which pushes the employee onto the federal subsidy program quite a bit different than what was expected. Like prohibition, trying to decide things that are "good for the country" generally don't work out as planned.
The problem is now and has been since the end of WW II that neither Japan nor China want anything from the US. This isn't something new. You would think that US-grown rice would have a market in Japan and China - nope, it doesn't meet their standards. It doesn't matter what the standards are, either - whatever is brought over instantly doesn't meet their "new" standard.
For the most part, folks in the US have stopped trying because it doesn't work. There is no power that can force Japan or China to "Buy American".
Why, with this as a given for the last 70 years or so, would anyone open up "free trade" with China? But it was viewed by some as a way to influence their policies on human rights. Yeah, sure. We can complain about their human rights record while they are burying us economically. Because we encouraged it.
The problem on our side is that as a member of the WTO, we can't impose tariffs on imports - including importing work that takes place overseas. Doing so will not last a month until it is repealed. Remember the flap about steel imports? No, we are't getting out of this by taxing or imposing surcharges. Quite possibly the only way out will be the market for offshore workers collapsing because the companies in the US go belly-up.
The WTO is going to balk at any attempted tax like this.
This would be equivalent to a tax on imported products as it would seriously hurt the economy of places like India and China. That is clearly within the relm of the WTO. So unless the US wants to be subject to trade sanctions, this isn't going to happen.
They have been saying "More bars in more places" for so long. They are going to be rudely shocked when they discover after the software update that it isn't more bars and phone reports a lot less coverage than it used to.
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Hey, remember that there are plenty of people that rely on credit cards to provide some extra income. Credit card fraud is pretty much a non-prosecuted crime in the US. Why not let the folks that can make what money they can?
1. Never, ever use a debit card for anything. It isn't worth it.
2. Your credit card number will be stolen. Accept it as a fact of life. It doesn't cost you anything so stop worrying.
That's it.
Evidently, the person with the prototype is in Russia. I guess Nokia probably could pay for whatever police enforcement they would like to have on this, so that may be what is going to happen.
I would suspect the proper answer would be the same as if it was dropped into an active volcano - something along the lines of "Well, there it goes."
This sounds like a Wikipedia approach to "truth"... you have enough people voting on it and sooner or later you have something that sort of resembles and might actually be truth. Or in this case, accuracy.
I would think there would be much better ways than this of obtaining accuracy. One of the basic problems with any voting scheme is that you can get a large amount of drift as it is assumed there is no standard other than concensus. NTP is a reference because there is are systems out there that are known to be anchored to accurate time standards.
I suppose if you were setting up a platform on Mars and had nothing else except concensus and voting this might be an approach. But that would seem to be about the only reason for accepting a scheme like this. On Earth there are way, way better ways of dealing with the problem that are actually rooted to accurate standards.
Everyone should know about paper recycling - it costs more to use recycled paper than new. The quality is questionable as well. The result is that most paper is dumped into an incinerator or a landfill by recycling centers because it is pointless to attempt to recycle post-consumer paper.
Plastic bottles can be recycled... except if one tiny little bottle cap or ring gets into the mix the entire batch is worthless. Since this happens most of the time again plastic bottles are not generally recycled.
Aluminium is one great success in that it is actually cheaper to smelt down aluminium cans than it is to process the raw ore. So a lot of aluminium is actually recycled and it makes economic sense.
Really, if we wanted to build the cost of recycling computers and other high-tech devices into the product cost you would quickly see a drop in new product consumption. $500 for the computer with a $500 add-on for recycling it. $600 for an iPad with $500 for recycling it. $25,000 for a car with $10,000 for recycling it. It would be one way to deal with the recycling problem and it would immediately end most of the need to actually recycle things because the sales would be so reduced as to not require much recycling at all. It would be a way of actually implementing "reduce".
Without that, there is going to be little incentive to either meaningfully reduce consumer buying or force consumers to recycle obsolete or non-functional items. I'd say a minimum charge of $500 for any high-tech device would be reasonable, assuming the devices are being disassembled and processed using Western wage level workers. Now the $10 for the plastic water bottle (each) might also have an effect on both sales of such single-use bottles and the number entering landfills.
My guess on the Apple connectors is that they can be licensed out for a fee. Considering the margins on notebook computers these days, nobody is going to reward Apple for their engineering talent on that connector by licensing it from Apple.
Of course we all know that Apple should just give it away so everyone can benefit. After all, wouldn't that be the nice thing to do?
Wouldn't surprise me if Dell patented their connector and power-supply sensing as well.
The problem is the ratings. If you have a notebook that requires 110 watts to power the seven USB connectors, GPU, three fans and the 17 inch display and you plug in a common 65 watt power supply you are going to have (a) a fire or (b) a blown fuse and a non-functioning power supply.
So manufacturers have strong motivations to make sure that you can only connect the proper power supply to the computer. If it was possible to connect the wrong one, people would do it. If there was a fire the manufacturer (not the idiot that did it) would be blamed. In the US, the manufacturer would also be sued and likely lose. Allowing idiots to start fires is not viewed very well by juries. We must protect our idiots as they may be important political or business leaders someday.
So it is obvious - require all notebooks to use the same rating power supply. That isn't going to go over very well with Alienware or a number of other desktop-replacement companies that have notebooks with enourmous power requirements. It would also be silly for netbooks to have to use the same larger power supply.
Now a standard connector based on ratings might work. But there are still going to be 10 different connectors because not everyone is going to go to the trouble that Dell did.
I find this somewhat hard to believe. For the last 8 years or more Dell has standardized on two power supplies with a single connector. The 65 watt and 90 watt supplies - together with software to make sure that if you connect the 65 watt power supply to a computer that needs the 90 watt one it will degrade gracefully.
So basically, anyone with a Dell notebook needs only a single type of power supply. You found it difficult to find a replacement in Japan? These are sold on Ebay from China they are so common. I have left mine in various places but never have I run into a situation where someone didn't have one lying around - usually from an older Dell notebook that wasn't being used.
Dell is halfway there already to having a standardized power supply and has gone the extra mile to make sure that plugging the wrong capacity one in doesn't result in a fire or a blown fuse.
Kensington also sells a "generic" power supply often available for as little as $20 with a Dell connector in the box. If all you need is the 65 watt version, this is probably the most common power supply on the planet right now.
The changes aren't just not driving an SUV. It is things like not driving at all. Not being able to buy food in plastic packaging and only buy food that is grown within 100 miles or so of where you live. Things like starting to put people to work demolishing freeways in California so the space can be used to move people closer to where they work - no more driving, no more freeways, etc.
Do you begin to understand the magnitude of the changes that are actually required?
How about a simple one? Assuming the immigration influx into the US continues and the building of new powerplants continues on the rapid pace it has for the last 40 years (like none at all), you can expect that we will be running out of electricity commonly. We have to make some hard decisions about offices and homes - and telecommunity isn't a solution. If your refrigerator won't keep food cold for a day without electricity better think about getting a new one. If your pets can't live without air conditioning, time to start thinking about an aquarium instead.
Sure, we could supply the entire country's electrical needs from solar cells in Arizona and Nevada. Except, who is going to keep the protesters out of the meetings where the new transmission lines get decided on? Nobody? It is their right? Well, then you can forget about new transmission lines because way, way too many people "know" they cause cancer, impotence and all sorts of other bad things. So they will not be built and solar cell farms in Arizona and Nevada will never be built, just like the huge wind farms in Texas - because the electricity cannot be transferred from there to the cities where it is needed.
For a moment, let us accept that the only way to actually force change upon the climate-change deniers is to take radical, violent action. Without this, they will not believe, they will not change and everything on the planet will die.
So, what have you done to further the goal of knocking these deniers off their pedastle of wealth and convenience? Burned any cars? After all, they are a symbol of 20th Century Western progress, right? How about destroying an airliner on the ground? They spew millions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year and you're not likely to hear of anyone dying because they couldn't go on vacation, right?
Maybe destroying a powerplant would be a good step? Or maybe a automobile bridge? Any of these is likely to have a positive effect on the balance of CO2 in the atmosphere.
Sadly, I have to report that the totals for 2010 so far are: 0 automobiles destroyed in the name of climate change, 0 airliners destroyed and 0 bridges destroyed. Due to massive opposition, no hydroelectric dams have been built. No nuclear plants are under construction and those that are planned have years and years of environmental impact studies to go before the first hole is dug.
Overall, I'd say the climate-change deniers are winning the game. If everyone is so convinced that these deniers are not rational, why is nothing happening?
The problem is, you can't conserve your way out of the current set of problems. Just plugging the thing in consumes power. Power that, if it wasn't generated in the first place, wouldn't need any help in reducing some carbon footprint.
Come on, folks. There are two possible alternatives here. Plugging in yet another computer pushes things closer and closer to a tipping point where all life on the planet may suddenly die or there is no such thing as "anthropomorphic climate change", in which case it makes no difference. You can't have it both ways, which means any "conservation" effort which doesn't have a net negative consumption of resources is simply misdirection.
So if you want to talk about carbon footprints, it is really quite simple - don't plug it in. Unplug something else. This is a net benefit. Everything else, and I do mean everything else, is just moving things closer and closer to the point where the problems will be obvious.
So far, I have yet to see someone actually unplug something. They will make all kinds of excuses about how they are really "conserving" something or another by making their own lives easier. They are taking advantage of the electric power that through its generation may be destroying the biosphere. They are flying in planes that may be destroying the biosphere. They are driving cars that may be destroying the biosphere. I don't care if they traded in a Hummer for a Prius - it is simply a matter of degree. So they are contributing to the end of all life on the planet a little more slowly than they were before.
Of course, the other alternative is that "climate change" is something that is happening fully apart from the actions of humans and it makes no difference between driving a Hummer or a Prius, or not driving at all - as far as climate change is concerned. But to a lot of people it is deeply offensive to think that there are things that are utterly and completely beyond their (or anyone else's) control. I like to call this the "Not a sparrow shall fall" philosophy.
So if you are deeply committed to anthropomorphic climate change, go out a blow something up today or tomorrow. You will be doing your part to ensure that life does not end on Planet Earth. One (empty) jetliner is probably worth 1000 cars, at least.
Lawsuit. Everything in the US is driven by lawsuits.
Real simple. You call up the conference chairperson (or the venue where the conference is being held) and say "Our lawyer wants to thenk you for accepting liability for our ATM losses for the next six months. Of course, if you don't go ahead with the ATM security presentation we wouldn't have a case."
What do you do? I guess if you have the legal fund to stack up against the in-house counsel of a couple of banks it doesn't matter, let them threaten away. But really, who wants to take that risk?
That's all it is, a calculated risk.
The problem seems to be that you (as the taxpayer) get to support these folks one way or another.
Fine with plural marriage... not so fine with the seemingly usual result (broken homes, screwed up abused children). So the taxpayers get to support the excess wives and children.
If we could all just agree to have everyone supported by the government it would be much simpler. Then nobody would be complaining about having to support these people because we would all be supported by the government. No job, no problem - just get the same government money. I guess anyone left working (suckers!) would be paying 100% of their income in taxes. This would (obviously) do away with rich people as well as poor people - everyone would just get the same from the government.
Oh wait... didn't somebody try this already?
Standard photoflash lamps emit actinic light with plenty of UV. This has a negative effect on just about everything.
I believe there has been multiple cases where this was observed over time - flash photography causing material changes in some sort of artifact. Based on this experience lots of museums allow photography, just no flash. Some places keep the light levels higher than they would otherwise (intentionally) so it is possible to take pictures without a flash.
There is another factor here that you are missing - lawsuits.
Let's say you and a buddy are going to stage an accident and your buddy (the "victim") want you to get some good photos of his "accident". So now you have a slip-and-fall with lots of people rushing over to help and some really nice photos to go with it. JACKPPOT!
Can you imagine why people might be a little sensitive about someone standing around taking pictures? Could it be documentation for a lawsuit?
Probably 80-90% of public-facing behavior in the US today is driven by the possibilty of a lawsuit. Anyone, anywhere can sue anyone at any time for anything. It costs less than $1000 to try and if you have a clever scheme you are going to be awarded as much as $50,000 to go away and not bother the big company or public agency. The lawyer helping is going to get 1/3rd of this, so there are many helpful lawyers around.
Right now today most people don't seem to understand the way this lottery works. So as you walk down the street maybe only 1% of the people you meet are thinking of ways to game the system and get paid off. Actually, it is probably more like 0.01% or 1 out of 10,000. When unemployment was 4% (officially and maybe 8-10% really) most people had real work to do that they were getting paid for. Today with official unemployment at 10% and the unofficial numbers more like 20-25% I would think there would be a lot more motivation to get even modest payoffs.
Really, if you could collect $50,000 once a year legally would you continue to work? If you didn't have a job wouldn't this be really appealing? I suspect we are going to see a lot more of this going on.
Well, for starter is might be because the schools (K-12) are actively teaching the benefits of piracy. You know, the teacher tells the students that this new piece of software for everyone to use actually costs $500 but she got it for free from www.thepiratebay.com and there is lots of other stuff out there - they should check it out. Next day one of the students is telling the others what great stuff he found out there and spreads it around.
Think it doesn't happen? Wrong.
Your credit card fraud item is a joke, right? You haven't been paying attention. There are criminal gangs operating all over the world that do this sort of thing, generally from relatively law-free places or places where the cops respond very well to bribes. How you going to stop it?
For both piracy and credit card fraud, it doesn't cost anyone anything and nobody can do anything about it. Live with it. If you are upset about credit card fraud, consider it just another aspect of a generally law-free Internet. It is going to happen. It happens to me once a year on average and it has yet to cost me anything.
Based on some anecdotal evidence, I'd say the answers to your questions are:
Right now, no power on earth is going to change this. If the answer to #1 was 25% you might see a change, but that isn't possible. If the answer to #3 was 25% it might change things as well, but that isn't possible today either.
It is like catching 100% of speeders or 100% of drug users. Until you are actually injured in an accident by a person who is high or drunk it really doesn't sound like a problem needing a solution. We're training children in school about piracy - a how-to course - pretty much from first grade on up. The students see the teacher downloading and copying software and then their friends telling them what great stuff they got for free. It spreads. By the time they get to college it is an ingrained belief that if it is available on the Internet it is there for the taking. So we have copy-and-paste blogs, vast misuse of graphic images and people that believe they are doing the world a service when the rip a DVD and "share" it with the planet.
Sorry, but we have made a decision and it isn't going to be a bright sunny future for folks expecting revenue from digital goods. Now all we need is a way to download food and pirate rent money.
You are making a serious mistake. It is a common mistake, one made by our current President as well.
The mistake is beliving that all people in the US (or anywhere) can work at high skil jobs. There are probably three sorts of people that you need to consider:
What a lot of people seem to think is that the world is composed of the first two categories of people and utterly ignore the third. The problem with this thinking is that there are a lot of people that fit into the third category and no amount of training, education or motivational counseling is going to get them to learn how to do something like working in a tool and die shop. They might be perfectly happy in being a baggage handler in an airport or pushing a mail cart. Nothing too complicated and nothing that requires "brain work". If you haven't met someone like this you might not understand but there is clearly some fraction of the population that just isn't interested in "brain work" and finds abstract symbol manipulation to be nearly imcomprehensible. Frustraing. Boring.
So what do we do with people that could get along in a 1930s factory but find the office in 2010 to be completely out of their league? Do we put them on permanent welfare because they can't fit in to any high-skill job? Are they deserving of only being homeless and living in a shelter because they can't cope with 21st Century life?
Better think about that, because in spite of what people would like to believe, there are a lot of these people out there. And most of them are going to be unemployed, permanently, the way things are going.
No, you wouldn't. You check Google and pricewatch to see the lowest price and buy based on that. That is what the Internet has brought us.
If the lowest price is from a company that models their workforce on a Roman slave galley and the next more expensive product treats their workers nicely, you are going to buy from the low-price leader. Because the price investigative services on the Internet don't tell you how the workers are treated or where the tech support is based out of.
Yes, after you buy the lowest-cost product and find the tech support to be useless you say "I'll never buy another Acme product again!" Absolutely. And then six months later you are looking for something different and it turns out the lowest-cost product is once again from Acme. You might wonder for a few minutes about it and think there should be something you remember about that company. But until the box arrives it doesn't really matter - you buy it anyway because they have the lowest price.
This is what the Internet has given us. The lowest price is pretty much going to trump everything because unless the company is run by Satan with whip-wielding overseers ensuring that worker productivity remains high those sorts of problems aren't really going to figure promently in Google and never in the Shopping section. When do you think Google will highlight an entry on the Shopping search with a red (blinking?) box that says "This company is evil!!!"? Yeah, right. Never. Certainly not with three exclamation points. Probably not even with one. Naa, forget about it - Google will never post such a warning.
So we are left with making purchasing decisions based on low price and only low price. Quality of tech support will never factor into the decision.
Why would anyone pay this tax? I am assuming that you wouldn't propose taxing foreign goods from foreign companies because they aren't using US workers, right?
So the immediate result would be that instead of say, Acme Bowling Balls using offshore IT workers would be to sell off the entire IT division of the company to an Indian subsidary. Who would then be using local labor. Net effect would be zero.
Similarly, if you make things unpleasant enough in the US any company of any real size would simply move their operations to a subsidary that was based in a more corporate-friendly (and profit-friendly) place. The result is the outsourced/offshored workers stay right where they are and even fewer US workers have jobs.
You see, what has happened in the last 20 years or so is the reduction in costs of moving virtually everything around the planet. So it is now cheaper to make something in Malayasia and ship it to LA than it is to make it in LA to begin with. When you are shipping stuff by the containerload the cost per item is very low. So there is virtually no reason for any company to maintain anything in the US any longer.
This has to be factored into any decision about this sort of thing. The limitations on moving the company are far, far fewer than they were in 1980 or so. But if the US shifts policies in ways that make it cheaper and more profitable to shift the place where the work is done, well, you can expect the company to be leaving the US shortly. Manufacturing has already gone that way - and there are very few companies where the operation simply cannot be moved out of the US.
Health care would seem to be impossible to move - except today for non-trauma related care you can ship the patients around quite a bit. Mexico is getting a lot of business from the Southwestern US because it is cheaper to have elective/corrective surgery there than it is in the US.
Obviously service related businesses like air conditioning repair can't really be moved. Except the corporate office can be moved and the service technicians simply report to a shell company operated from a foreign headquarters where all their IT and administrative work is carried out with cheaper labor.
So don't think that some business can't move out of the US. Chances are they can move if pushed hard enough. And should the US decide to tax businesses using foreign workers (which might be a WTO violation anyway), a lot more companies might just decide to up and move.
And how would you enforce this? Part of the attraction is in plenty of places there is virtually zero government (and legal) oversight. You get to do pretty much whatever you want without a lot of busybody government agents sticking their noses into your business.
Works really well in Africa, India and China. Not so well in the US, even on Montana and Idaho.
This means that whatever you pay your workers is your business. The government man comes by once in a while for their cut and some of that gets into the government tax fund. The bigger the amount that ends up in the government man's pocket the more you know you are going to be left alone, esp. in Africa. I suspect the rules are about the same in India and China.
Because I know of no other tax in the US that is based on "negative externalities". Gas taxes in Europe are certainly environmental, but in the US they are directed primarily at the Federal level towards highway maintenance.
Historically, the US tax code is behaviorally driven. You want home ownership? Give a tax break to home owners. You want companies to hire foreign workers on H1-B visas? Give a tax break for H1-B workers. There have been a few attempts at taxing undesired behavior, such as the short-lived luxury tax on large boats, but it pretty much crippled businesses in the Southeast related to boat-building and was repealed. Similarly, the gas-guzzler tax was designed to push people toward smaller, lighter more fuel-efficient cars with seriously bad crash performance - it was repealed after noticing it wasn't having the desired effect. Today, I do not believe there are any taxes designed to penalize behavior nor are there any taxes addressing "negative externalities".
Sure, you might like to have some, but I don't think you are going to get any.
What's wrong with the argument "it would be better for the country if we taxed X"?
Well, for starters, who exactly might be deciding what is best for the country? Pick any two polar opposite political figures - say Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich. Would you be happy with either one of them deciding which was "best for the country"? I'd bet that while you might be OK with one of them the other would be a problem. So for the most part we don't have people deciding what might be "best for the country" at any level.
Certainly an example of this is the current healthcare situation. Yes, someone thought it might be best for the country to have a government-run healthcare system but was completely unable to implement it. What we got was a half-measure that could be implemented that is going to be extremely costly to fix. A big clue is that many medium-sized companies are discovering it is cheaper to pay the "fine" than to provide what will be approved as a healthcare package for an employee. Which pushes the employee onto the federal subsidy program quite a bit different than what was expected. Like prohibition, trying to decide things that are "good for the country" generally don't work out as planned.
The problem is now and has been since the end of WW II that neither Japan nor China want anything from the US. This isn't something new. You would think that US-grown rice would have a market in Japan and China - nope, it doesn't meet their standards. It doesn't matter what the standards are, either - whatever is brought over instantly doesn't meet their "new" standard.
For the most part, folks in the US have stopped trying because it doesn't work. There is no power that can force Japan or China to "Buy American".
Why, with this as a given for the last 70 years or so, would anyone open up "free trade" with China? But it was viewed by some as a way to influence their policies on human rights. Yeah, sure. We can complain about their human rights record while they are burying us economically. Because we encouraged it.
The problem on our side is that as a member of the WTO, we can't impose tariffs on imports - including importing work that takes place overseas. Doing so will not last a month until it is repealed. Remember the flap about steel imports? No, we are't getting out of this by taxing or imposing surcharges. Quite possibly the only way out will be the market for offshore workers collapsing because the companies in the US go belly-up.
The WTO is going to balk at any attempted tax like this.
This would be equivalent to a tax on imported products as it would seriously hurt the economy of places like India and China. That is clearly within the relm of the WTO. So unless the US wants to be subject to trade sanctions, this isn't going to happen.
Even though it might be a good idea.
They have been saying "More bars in more places" for so long. They are going to be rudely shocked when they discover after the software update that it isn't more bars and phone reports a lot less coverage than it used to.